Matcha Lip Balm

Okay, so I said I would post about some of the crafty stuff I am working on...

...so here is a post about MATCHA LIP BALM!

Before I go into detail, I want to post a disclaimer about this "experiment." I did not pull this recipe from the internet - I looked at a bunch of different recipes, gathered different ingredients, and experimented to find a concoction that suited me. The resulting concoction works more as lip gloss than balm, and I have not yet perfected the recipe to my satisfaction. I am calling it lip balm because it does indeed soothe lips (and I would know because my lips get a little cracked in the winter). So far I have not experienced any weird side effects. The matcha I used is the highest-grade matcha, completely organic, and most of the other ingredients I bought at Hobby Lobby. The Cherry Blossom essential oil I bought on Amazon for $4.00.

These are the ingredients I used: shea butter, coconut oil, petroleum jelly, cherry blossom essential oil, and matcha powder from Steeped Tea. For containers I just grabbed a package of round containers from Hobby Lobby's jewelry department.

If you're wondering, "why matcha?" I have only to say that matcha - which is a powdered form of green tea - is extremely healthy, not only for ingestion but for skin care as well!

I had no idea how much of anything to use. That's how disorganized I am! I just thought I'd throw things together and see how it turned out.

I unfortunately have no pictures of the ingredients mixed together. My hands were constantly oily/buttery. Plus, I'm lazy like that. But I have a picture of the end result!

I wrote down the formula so I would remember for a later time. This balm was smooth (and a little too oily) and refreshing on my lips, and lasted for several hours. It also produced a nice shine! The concoction settled nicely and was in no way "watery." I was dissatisfied with it, though, because it felt more like lip gloss and less like actual lip balm.

Apparently I needed beeswax.

So I went out and got some, but seriously, every attempt with the beeswax resulted in too stiff a balm - it was more like a matcha candle. So I need to adjust my ingredient amounts, which hopefully will give me the balm I seek.

My experiments were cut short by the baby's demands for attention, but I learned a lot from my day of experimentation, and hopefully I will have a chance in the future to develop the matcha lip balm of my dreams!

A Portrait of My Family

This is a picture from March 2014, when Jeff and I were dating in Topeka, KS. If you can't tell, we're totally in the St. Patrick's Day parade! Jeff is wearing his kilt; I'm wearing his plaid sash and plenty of green for the day! 

Jeff and I met in 2013 on CatholicMatch.com, an online dating site for Catholics. We had both experienced very recent heartbreak, but while Jeff had already dated a bunch of different girls, I was getting over a breakup from a 6-year relationship with my first boyfriend. Jeff and I had a lot in common: favorite authors; a love of nature; an interest in Renaissance fairs; our Catholic faith; and a shared amusement for fart jokes. Jeff made me laugh all the time and loved introducing me to new things like Skyrim, Pink Floyd, Dungeons&Dragons, and Doctor Who. Being a couple of nerds, it only took two dates for us to go steady. I consider Jeff to be the puzzle piece I cannot live without; he completes me as much as I complete him. 

We married in January 2015. Was our whirlwind courtship something I regret? Nope and never! Sometimes, when you meet your other half, there is no need to wait. With God's grace, it was His will that we became man and wife. 

Our life, at first, was far from easy. We lived in Topeka, KS, in apartments that were poorly managed and filled with people who smoked in the hallways and threw their liquor bottles in the stairwell. Jeff was miserable in his job, which offered him no benefits despite being full-time and used him as a delivery boy despite Jeff's numerous talents and certification for building technology. I hesitated to get a job because Jeff and I talked often of moving to Hays, KS, where he was born and had grown up. The monkey wrench in the complicated gears was my pregnancy, of which we became aware of a month after our honeymoon. 

Elliot playing peek-a-boo!

Ugh, pregnancy in that apartment was horrible! I was sick every day until mid-April, and the smells harassed me endlessly. In April, Jeff lost his job - as he put it, he and his employer "parted ways." We had no income, no health insurance, and we were miles and miles away from close friends and relatives. Our Lord had answered our prayers! Without anything to hold us back, we took the lemons in our life and added sugar, water, and a lot of smiles! 

Meaning, that is, that we moved our butts to Hays, KS, where Jeff immediately found a job (with benefits!) and I found an awesome OB. We found a lovely apartment with fantastic management. I started blogging, and I became a tea consultant! My body was growing round with my precious bundle and we had friends and family to help us get settled in our new home. 

My first Steeped Tea party!

And then, as you know, Elliot was born in September...and we just celebrated our first anniversary this past January! Is our marriage easy? No way! Finances, of course, were our worst nightmare, and sometimes they still are. We totally fight about petty things I never imagined we'd have fights about - like what side of the sink to wash dishes in. Weird, right? But our fights prove to me that we have our differences and our opinions and our independent selves that still need working on - believe me, it isn't easy to be single one moment and then married the next! I find that the biggest obstacle I face is my own selfishness, and when I work on improving that, I automatically improve our marriage. He finds that by trusting me and communicating with me, we both learn more about each other, our problems, and our ideas for solutions.

Also, my husband was right about which side of the sink is easier to wash in.

Our Halloween picture. Jeff looks done. Elliot at 2 months! Me trying (and failing) to look gothic.

Lent is Coming Up!

Hi, everyone! 

Lent is here! 

Last year I was a bad Catholic and did not attend much to my spiritual life during this time. The only excuse I have is that I was pregnant and yarking all over the place and feeling pretty horrible the whole time. Still, being pregnant exempted me from the fasting and abstinence. I might have tried to make a small sacrifice in giving up sweets, but at some point I'm pretty sure I gave up giving up. 

But this year is different! I have nothing to excuse me now. I have given up sweets and bread (rolls, buns, sandwich bread, etc.) and I am focusing on my prayer and meditation more. I was hoping to read parts of the Bible to Elliot but there never seems to be a moment of peace for us when I can read to him. 

We went to Ash Wednesday Mass in the evening, since my husband was working the graveyard shift and slept during the day. We brought Elliot with us and once again we were so impressed with our little man's good behavior in church! I know it isn't destined to last, but right now I'm loving our baby's wide-eyed stares and silence during the holiest of prayers. 

 

For those of you who may be unaware, Lent is a time - much like Advent - of expectation and prayer. Catholics especially have a special connection to Lent in that it leads to the day of Christ's Resurrection - also known as Easter. We journey with Christ along His road; we experience temptations, witness His miracles, and hear His message of love that the Pharisees were unable to understand or tolerate. The Easter Triduum at the end of Lent marks the time in which we celebrate Christ's Passion, Death, and His Resurrection. We follow Christ along the Way of the Cross and pray for souls on earth while administering to our own wounded souls through prayer, Mass, the sacrament of the Eucharist, charitable works, and of course, fasting and abstinence. 

The ashes on our foreheads are given to us with the words, "Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It is a grim reminder of our mortality. But we know that, in the celebration of Easter, we are given a firm reminder of the immortality of our souls and how they may be united with Christ if we but tend them with love and care. 

Father's homily on Ash Wednesday also reminded me of something. He spoke of Jesus' request that we pray and do our charitable acts in secret so that our Father in heaven may reward us. In this world of social media, where everyone shares everything and many seek publicity or 15 minutes of fame, Christ's words may be a hard concept to understand or accept. Especially if you refuse to believe that God is read; why bother doing anything in secret when you could enjoy the praise and admiration from flesh-and-blood people? But the phrase "doing good for good's sake" is a principle that applies well in this case. It is meaningful to help others when there's nothing in it for you. 

In other news, Valentine's Day (otherwise known as Singles' Appreciation Day) is coming up! I was looking forward to Applebee's, but since Applebee's is practically the only nice restaurant in town, it's too likely to be packed. So I told him I'd settle for home-cooked steak, chocolate, and then an evening watching Deadpool. 

Oh, yeah.

I never saw the point of flowers, although I always got jealous of my friends and coworkers who received them from their loved ones on Valentine's Day. Honestly, I never bought into the consumerism behind the holiday; it seemed to be just as good as any other day and there was little significance behind it for me. Still, it's one of those fun little holidays that brings cheer to people (or gloom, take your pick, but even while I was single I didn't care; pizza, soda, and movies were my lovers on that day). It's impossible not to get sucked into the spirit of the holidays! 

Matcha Cookies!

Hello everyone! Today I am posting about some morning baking projects!

When I went grocery shopping this past Sunday, I had some projects in mind (ideas pulled from Pinterest) for saving money and keeping delicious food in the fridge. One of those projects was the breakfast rollups:

I apologize for the terrible picture. If you can tell, breakfast rollups are basically sausages and cheese wrapped up in Pillsbury crescent rolls. The Pinterest post included egg, but I was impatient and had no time for scramblin' eggs! They were SO GOOD, though, and would go well with a side of scrambled egg and orange juice for a complete breakfast!

My other baking project was matcha cookies! Now, I am currently obsessed with making cookies out of cake mixes; the cookies come out so soft and moist and delicious that it's almost a sin to consume them! I wanted to try a recipe that used cream cheese, so I searched and picked the recipe with the most stars, which happened to be a Betty Crocker recipe. Here is the link:

http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/cake-mix-gooey-butter-cookies/f7a9017b-870f-4b20-b37f-392f53c65fbc

Since I am a rebel and don't follow recipes to a T, I used the following ingredients:

They were having a sale on Pillsbury cake mixes at the grocery store.

I'm using matcha in the recipe because I am obsessed with this stuff right now! Matcha green tea is the powdered form of the tea leaf; unlike steeped tea, which steeps the leaf in water before removing it, matcha is combined with water and consumed entirely. Matcha is high in antioxidants and is a possible preventative of cancer. It is quite possible that matcha is the healthiest drink in the universe. So adding matcha to your cooking, baking, beauty products, and skin care is actually very good for you!

So the first thing I did was to melt the cream cheese and butter until it was soft.

After that I added the egg and vanilla extract. I know, in the picture it says "imitation vanilla," but that's from a time when my husband went out grocery shopping and of course he bought cheap, which I don't have a problem with, but I'd prefer the real stuff to imitation.

After beating these ingredients together, I added the cake mix.

Elliot was in the kitchen helping mommy make matcha cookies!

I was unsure how much matcha to use in the mix and I was too lazy to look up a recipe, so I just dumped in about a Tbsp. Now, the thing about matcha is that the taste is bitter. The smell is bitter. If you don't add sugar to the drink, it is bitter. Some people prefer that; I on the other hand need sugar with my tea. But when you add the matcha to the cookie mix, you don't need any extra sugar to mask the bitterness; the dough was delicious!

You can see the faint greenish tint to the cookie dough from just that small amount of matcha!

I had to clean off my pan (I have one baking sheet, and yes, I know I need more) and do one batch at a time. The first batch came out a little brown on the sides, but this is because I was not monitoring the oven properly (the baby needed a diaper change and a bottle). The next batch will probably come out much better. Trying one of the cookies, they are delicious!

Before baking

I'm sorry I have no "after baking" pictures right now. I wanted to get this blog post in while the baby was sleeping! But the conclusion to the matcha cookie experiment is that they are quite yummy. I would highly encourage people to make their own matcha cookies, not only for the taste but for the added health benefits!

Elliot's Baptism!

Elliot was Baptized into the Catholic Church on January 9th, 2016!

Baptism is important to Catholics. For us, it is one of the seven sacraments instituted by Jesus, and an opportunity for an outpouring of grace upon our little one as he begins his life as a baptized child of God. We believe that in Baptism, the stain of Original Sin is washed away and an indelible mark of belonging to Christ is placed upon the one receiving the sacrament. We as parents have the sacred duty to nurture Elliot in the Church's teachings and to set a holy example for him to imitate. The Catholic faith will provide him with much-needed spiritual nourishment for his personal growth, in soul, mind, and body.

Arranging the Baptism had taken forever because our parish required a form to be filled out by the godparents - and I wanted my sister (who lived in Nebraska) and my brother (who lived in Louisiana) to be godparents. They had to get their parish priests to sign the form for them. And as both of them were super busy - my sister with her master's program and my brother with the Air Force - it took a while to get the forms back to me. But once they did, Jeff and I set a date with our parish, sent out invitations, and whipped up a little reception for after the Baptism. It was a lot of work, but a lot of people were able to come and witness Elliot's Catholic birthday! Jeff and I were so proud of our little boy and our first forward steps into life as Catholic parents!

In the meantime, Elliot is getting a very "rounded" education. He has a lot of toys that he loves to play with, and we play all kinds of music for him! He watches momma cook and clean in the kitchen and watches daddy play WoW and Fallout 4. I am currently reading "The House at Pooh Corner" to him, and we count to twenty and sing our ABC's. Sometimes, when momma needs a break, I let him play in his gym and relax with a cup of tea and an ASMR video. Or Pinterest. Sometimes both (I multitask). Every day is a new discovery!

Elliot fascinated by his toy truck

This past week Jeff had a close childhood friend pass away in a car accident. It made us both realize the value of life and how terrible it would be if we lost each other or Elliot. The bible tells us that our lives are like the blades of grass; here today and gone tomorrow; they wither and fade with the passing seasons. We can't know the future or how much pain we will have to endure. I dread losing people close to me and don't like to think about how much heartache I will have to suffer in losing them, as I know I inevitably will. It's no wonder that our culture indulges in "eternal youth" to take our minds off growing old and leaving this world! But as Catholics we cling to the hope that we will be united with our loved ones again in heaven, and that if we live our lives for God, to the fullest and with love and generosity, surely we have nothing to fear from death. As the saying goes, there is a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Today we have our first snow day! We here in Kansas have finally been hit by a snowstorm. I went out to buy groceries on Sunday and of course EVERYONE ELSE WAS THERE. They had practically cleaned the shelves of the Ranch Wheat Thins. I had to do with a box of regular. Incidentally, I was not there for the snowstorm; I was there because our house was totally devoid of foodstuff. Okay, not totally devoid, but it's hard to subsist on a can of kidney beans and some cocoa powder packets.

Soon I will blog about some of my projects that I'm doing! I am making a denim skirt, a mantilla, and matcha lip balm. I'm so excited! I have so many things I'm getting up to. I'll post again as soon as I have pictures (and results)!


.